Ocean Tower
Ocean Tower SPI was an unfinished 31-story, 114-meter-high residential building in South Padre Island , Texas . It achieved great popularity due to the serious structural defects that led to a lopsidedness. With a weight of 50,000 tons, it is also the largest reinforced concrete structure that has ever been blown up.
Ocean Tower was touted to potential buyers as the tallest building in the Rio Grande Valley, with Italian marble floors and oversized hot tubs in each apartment.
construction
After a month of investigations by geologists and engineers, construction began on April 5, 2006. The work continued for two years until layers of clay at a depth of 30 meters affected the building. Load-bearing structures began to bend and even break, and the tower leaned in the northwest direction, away from the garage, causing damage to the garage walls as well. From then on the people called the building the Leaning Tower of South Padre Island and Fawlty Towers .
Parts of the tower sank 36 to 41 centimeters, while the garage moved significantly less. The reason was that the weight of the tower was on one side of the parking garage instead of being diverted through its own foundation. The problem was exacerbated by the use of expanded clay , which compresses under heavy loads.
Construction work was stopped in summer 2008. When more than a hundred apartments were sold in July, the construction company sent letters to buyers promising that the apartments would go into operation, but with a delay of six to nine months. It was planned to structurally separate the less strongly sinking parking garage from the high-rise building and to relieve the girders with new pillars.
Four months later, various reports from engineers came to the conclusion that the renovation work was too expensive and uneconomical. The purchase agreements were then terminated.
Destruction and Consequences
All still usable material - kitchen and bathroom fixtures, doors, windows - was removed from the building before it was blown up on the morning of December 13, 2009. The demolition attracted a large audience. Of the total construction cost, $ 75 million, $ 65 million had to be written off. The owner sued two engineering companies and the construction company for a total of $ 125 million in damages. The construction company was released early from the process because it could not prove responsibility.